“Go see to the intruder, dear. And get Dennett what he needs.” The Gravid Mother gave Cook a push. “You,” she told me, “are going to stay right here and keep me company while he’s gone.” There was a hard edge to her voice, promising pain if I defied her.
“But I’ve got to—”
She reached out with three meaty hands and grabbed my ankles. “You’re going nowhere until I say you can.”
“But I—” While she held me, Cook grabbed a bundle of clothes from one side of the door, opened the hatch, and sprang out. It slammed shut again with a loud click.
“You’re not going to tell anyone about what you saw, are you?” she said, shaking me.
“Of course not.” I looked at the door. “Do you think he’ll do what you said?” I asked.
“If he wants to get laid again, he will.” She arched her back against the bed-web, all six generous breasts pointing at me like gun muzzles. Was that expression intended to be a saucy grin? Or a dominant snarl? What did she take me for? “Make yourself comfortable. We’re safe from your stalker in here—as long as the door stays locked.”
Unknown to me, while I was coming to terms with my embarrassment at stumbling upon the Gravid Mother and Cook in flagrante, momentous and fatal events were happening elsewhere aboard the chapel.
After my departure, Dennett pressed ahead, as he had promised: tweaking energy and water inputs, meddling with the temperature in Lady Cybelle’s sarcophagus, and generally meddling with things that he was not, in truth, qualified to meddle with. Perhaps a fully initiated priest of the Mysteries of the Fragile might have been able to bring the fermenting vat of semiferal mechanocytes into domesticated harmony with the unifying will of Cybelle’s still-slumbering skeleton and chassis. But Dennett was a junior minister, undertrained for such a demanding task: and more to the point, sufficiently unskilled to be overconfident about his own abilities.
I am a historian, not an initiate, but in preparing this document, I have made some attempt at informing myself as to the precise nature of the task at hand. People’s bodies—the bodies of post-Fragile people like you and I—are, like those of the Fragile, made out of cells. But whereas Fragile cells are fragile sacks of fatty acids and peptides and water, our mechanocytes are bigger, vastly more complex, and contain control subsystems of entirely artificial design. Fragile cells can replicate themselves but are murderously hard to reprogram—whereas a mechanocyte can be ordered around, told which neighbors to attach itself to and what type of organ tissue to remodel itself into. Mechanocytes don’t self-replicate, but are either manufactured by the specialized marrow techné ’cytes nestled in our long bones, or are produced in bulk in factories. We don’t get cancer, the disease of uncontrolled self-replication. But if we suffer excessive damage, we may be unable to recover without an externally provided infusion of bulk raw mechanocytes—and then we need to have an engineering supervisor or a priest to program them into useful working tissues, lest we end up being eaten by a ball of undifferentiated feral goo. Mechanocytes in a body must sacrifice some of their autonomy for the collective good; they trade nutrients and energy, obey orders, and bid for resources. There is, in fact, an internal economy that unites the ’cytes of a body: a market driven by the debt created by their host’s existence, a life defined by their willingness to cooperate. Death is really no more than the voluntary liquidation of an economy of microscopic free agents, the redemption of the debt of structured life. We are, after all, homo economicus.
Lady Cybelle had been killed during the micrometeoroid accident that damaged the chapel. Not injured, not burned, but killed: her head smashed and her soul chips irradiated by the reactor excursion, torso and legs horribly burned by corrosive oxidizer. Those of her mechanocytes that survived reverted to feral independence, seceding from the great economy of her life.
But Dennett had retrieved her soul chips—the solid-state backup of her neural activity—from the back of what was left of her skull. That was the key to what came next.
The resurrection of the prematurely dead is time-consuming and difficult but by no means unusual, and under other circumstances, it has become almost routine. You lay down a new skeleton, install seed mechanocytes while running a script to assign them to build new organs, including a brain. You infuse nutrients to buy their cooperation. Then you install the soul chips and train the first neurocytes to play their part in the ensemble of her identity, encoded in the neural net within her skull. The more of them that buy into the enterprise of the body, the greater becomes the pressure on newly added mechanocytes to join the throng: It happens a million times every day, across inhabited space. It happened to me, each time I arrived in a new beacon station arrivals hall.
The difference—
The deacon had neglected to establish whether Lady Cybelle’s soul chips contained a complete and consistent dump of her neural state. Or whether the two soul chips even agreed about her state of mind at the moment of death. (He also failed to pay attention to a number of subtle issues relating to initializing a new brain—there is more to it than simply pumping a hundred million bloated metaneurocytes into a skull and flicking the “on” switch—but these paled into insignificance compared to his other errors.) As it happens, Lady Cybelle’s soul chips had not come through the accident unscathed. And the neural connectome of a brain is not an all-or-nothing proposition, like a program in an archaic formal language: It will work even with considerable errors present. But an error-riddled one won’t work properly. There will be glitches, memory holes, dyskinesias, personality changes, emotional upsets. And if one attempts to merge two different error-riddled connectomes, one doesn’t necessarily improve the situation. Consequently, the Lady Priestess’s higher cognitive functions were, shall we say, not yet bedded in: the error-prone soul chips were in place, but her personality and memories had not yet annealed. And that’s not the worst part of what Dennett had failed to do: He had ignored the implications of loading faulty brain dumps into a body that had not yet finished assimilating and indenturing a huge influx of raw, free-market mechanocytes.
Normally, the recipient’s techné would indoctrinate the new ’cytes as they circulated, assigning them a role and a nutrient credit balance and dispatching them to whatever tissue type was most in need, and all would run smoothly. But techné in a ferment of tissue replacement is techné that needs vastly more energy than normal. Deacon Dennett was in a hurry. He sent me to round up the vital nutrients but did not wait for me to return with them before he turned up the heat under Cybelle’s marrow, pushing her metabolism into cytological inflation.
So, of course, it was nobody but his own fault when Lady Cybelle’s etiolated body sat up inside the sarcophagus, looked around blankly, unplugged itself from the various pipes, tubes, and cables to which she was fastened, and climbed out of the hatch in search of food.
I say “Lady Cybelle’s body,” not “Lady Cybelle.” Brains consume energy—a disproportionate amount of one’s intake. And unlike the Fragile, people like us have the ability to handle famine efficiently; to shut down unnecessary organs and higher functions, to enter estivation if necessary, and to take extraordinary actions to satiate our needs in event of an emergency. Even the best of us lose our minds if subjected to extreme privations: A Fragile would simply die, but we stop thinking and temporarily become less than human—raw survival machines, bent on maintaining life by any means necessary. Monitor cameras witnessed what happened, of course. They saw the woman, naked and lean as any of the mummified servitors, her skin the unnatural white of pigment-depleted chromatophores, clamber clumsily through the circular hatch two-thirds of the way up the bell of the Soyuz. Deacon Dennett had his back turned to her, for he had returned to the organ pit to fuss over the engine controls (in a futile attempt to wring some extra thrust from the motors and postpone the inevitable reckoning with the approaching pirates). Leaning over his keyboards, fingers dancing across white and black keys and occasionally darting forward to pull or push the stops, he was so enthralled by his virtuoso performance that he failed to see Cybelle’s head twitch round, blank-eyed and empty of expression, attracted by his movements. Movements that singled him out as the nearest available source of energy and nutrients.